Venezuela drawing a new type of tourism

Activists come to study Chavez's leftist policies

Published 5:30 am, Sunday, October 24, 2004

CARACAS, VENEZUELA - When Californian Katie Lahey traveled to Venezuela, she didn't head to Caracas' glitzy east side as most visitors from the United States do.

Lahey, 21, instead came to the Caracas neighborhood of 23 de Enero, a slum known for its housing projects and red-brick shacks that is a hotbed of support for leftist President Hugo Chavez.

Largely uninterested in the country's tropical beaches or its quaint mountain villages, Lahey said she came to Venezuela last spring to study the Bolivarian Revolution, the name of Chavez's reform movement.

Now she spends her days walking the streets of 23 de Enero and working with community organizations, or traveling across the country to see the social programs of the Chavez government.

'Hope and struggle'

"This is not just about the dream of Hugo Chavez. It's about the hope and struggle of a people with their leader," said Lahey as she sat on a porch overlooking some of Caracas' poorest neighborhoods.

Under the leadership of Chavez, who has become a hero to the left by painting the global struggle of the poor as a David and Goliath battle between good and evil, Venezuela has become a magnet for North American idealists and anti-globalization activists.

Elected in 1998 and again in 2000 on an anti-poverty, anti-corruption platform, Chavez has promised to use his country's oil wealth to reduce poverty through myriad social programs ranging from literacy courses to land reform.

"Venezuela has become a major source of interest for social visionaries in the United States," said Larry Birns, director of the left-leaning Council on Hemispheric Affairs in Washington. "The Latin American left was dormant during the 1990s, but it is now in revival. And nowhere is this more evident than in Venezuela."

Statistics are unavailable on the number of tourists who have visited Venezuela to see Chavez's social programs. But the government's foreign office has worked to coordinate such visits, and U.S. anti-globalization groups have promoted travel to Venezuela as a way to witness social activism up close.

Popular destinations for such travelers are clinics where Cuban doctors provide free medical services to slum residents and community radio stations run by the poor.

"President Chavez is trying to provide poor people with health care, education and decently paid jobs," said Brenda Stokely, a New York City union leader who recently visited Caracas to speak at a pro-Chavez rally. "Anyone opposed to that either has their head under a rock or has no respect for human beings that live in poverty."

'Ideological tourists'

Chavez's opponents, however, rail against the foreign visitors as voyeuristic "ideological tourists" more interested in the romance of a far-away revolution than in understanding the nuances of politics in Venezuela, the world's fourth-largest oil exporter.

"These people are like 19th century anthropologists who travel the world looking for primitive cultures," said Amalio Belmonte, a sociologist. "Then they return to their comfortable lives in the First World and repeat Chavez's revolutionary discourse but with no interest in finding out the other side of the story."

In fact, he said, even some of the poorest Venezuelans oppose Chavez, who has bitterly divided the country into those who support his reform programs and those who believe he is taking Venezuela toward Cuba-style communism.

Chavez was ousted in a coup in April 2002 but returned to power two days later.

The firebrand populist survived a two-month oil strike aimed at forcing him from office and in August beat back a recall campaign by winning a national referendum with 59 percent of the vote.

Opposition leaders insist he won the recall election through fraud, even though former U.S. President Carter and the Organization of American States back the results.

'Solidarity Networks'

In the United States, the coup prompted the creation of "Solidarity Networks," small organizations of activists who promote Chavez's social reforms on Web sites and at meetings. The groups often show a documentary of the coup called
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,
which has been blasted by Chavez's foes as propaganda.

The Chavez government has arranged visits by such American celebrities as actor Danny Glover, who came to Venezuela in January with a delegation from the TransAfrica Forum. Later this year, the government hopes to arrange a meeting between Chavez and filmmaker Michael Moore.

But most who visit Venezuela to see Chavez's social reforms come on their own.

"I wrote my university thesis on the Chavez government, and I felt like I needed to see it firsthand," said Jonah Gindin, 24, who came to Venezuela from Toronto, Canada, in March to work as a volunteer in the government's literacy program.

"Now I get e-mail every week from people interested in doing the same thing."